Dante and the Blessed Virgin

Prologue

ix P r o l o g u e One of the marvels of art is that our appreciation of it does not require that we share the outlook of the artist. There must, of course, be sympathy, and more than sympathy, with the protagonist and with his manner of viewing his plight. A reader in the third millennium can be drawn into a Greek tragedy and experience the anguish of a character whose culture is utterly alien to his own. Explanations of this have been advanced. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief, a dismissal of the differences, and then immersion in a plot involving decisions almost wholly foreign in their weight and gravitas to those that engage the latter-day reader. Almost wholly foreign. What counterpart in our times could there be, pace Freud, to the dilemma of ­ Oedipus? Nonetheless, it may well be said that beneath the undeniable strangeness is the note of familiarity, a familiarity due to our common humanity. The great imaginative works bring about in us a sense of affinity with agents living in cultural circumstances long since gone. But we need not appeal only to the chronologically distant. When we read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the mesmerizing voice of the narrator establishes a rapport with such a one as Kurtz, a Kurtz who, alive or dead, we could never be. Moreover, we grasp the contrast between a Europe that no longer exists and a colonial Africa that is no more. It seems not to matter at all that those referents no longer exist. x Prologue Call our empathy aesthetic, in the best sense of the term. For the duration of the story, we sense and feel that the protagonist is ourselves and we are him. We reach across the differences and in some way we are one with Kurtz, notre semblable, notre frère. I think, too, of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” One who does not share the poet’s interpretation of the way in which Christianity is the putative casualty of nineteenth-century philology and science can nonetheless occupy the outlook of the poem and be stirred. The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world. One can argue with Arnold’s prose work on these matters, but the argument of the poem requires only our responding to the feelings that would accompany holding Arnold’s melancholy views, and we experience a similar frisson. Great imaginative works enable us to sense a common humanity with those with whom we have almost nothing else in common. But it would not do to suggest that there is just some residue of common nature that remains when all the differences have been thought away. Appreciation of the story requires that, for a time, we take on an outlook and occupy circumstances that have little to do with our own lives. All this is fanfare for the way we read Dante. I have sometimes been struck, at meetings of medievalists, by the way in which the beliefs of those long ago days are discussed with perceptiveness and intelligence, but also with the unstated sense that we are dealing with matters no longer believed, indeed, incredible. Aesthetically, from the vantage point of the scholar, surpassed attitudes can be reoccupied and things said of pith and moment. Once, however, I listened to a somewhat facetious talk having to do with medieval Eucharistic Prologue xi treatises, and it occurred to me to remark that there were those of us in the audience who shared the beliefs of the authors of those treatises . This was not criticism, nor was it an irrelevant remark. I have come to think that there can be an advantage—it is a possibility only, nothing inevitable­ —in sharing the deepest beliefs of an author whose assumptions must otherwise be taken on only in an aesthetic and scholarly way. Dantisti, as a group, seem to me to be a very special breed of scholar. Those whom I have come most to admire, whatever their personal attitude toward the Catholic faith that animates all the work of the great Florentine, seem to possess an uncanny ability to enter into...